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Anyone still unclear about why the police are constructing a modern-day Bastille around Quebec City in preparation for a forthcoming summit and the unveiling of the Free Trade Area of the Americas should take a look at a case being heard by a Canadian provincial supreme court.

In 1991 a United States waste management company, Metalclad, bought a closed-down toxic treatment facility in Guadalcazar, Mexico. The company wanted to build a huge, hazardous waste dump, and promised to clean up the mess left behind by the previous owners. In the years that followed it expanded operations without seeking local approval, earning little goodwill in Guadalcazar. Residents lost trust that Metalclad was serious about cleaning up, feared continued groundwater contamination, and eventually decided that the foreign company was not welcome.

In 1995, when the landfill was ready to open, the town and state intervened with what legislative powers they had available: the city denied Metalclad a building permit, and the state declared that the area around the site was part of an ecological reserve.

I've never been to Chiapas. I've never made the pilgrimage to the Lacandon jungle. I've never sat in the mud and the mist in La Realidad. I've never begged, pleaded or posed to get an audience with Subcomandante Marcos, the masked man, the faceless face of Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army. I know people who have. Lots of them. In 1994, the summer after the Zapatista rebellion, caravans to Chiapas were all the rage in north American activist circles: friends got together and raised money for secondhand vans, filled them with supplies, then drove south to San Cristobal de las Casas and left the vans behind. I didn't pay much attention at the time. Back then, Zapatista-mania looked suspiciously like just another cause for guilty lefties with a Latin American fetish: another Marxist rebel army, another macho leader, another chance to go south and buy colourful textiles. Hadn't we heard this story before? Hadn't it ended badly?

Ever since I wrote a book about nasty multinationals and the activists who bash them, I started getting the question: "So Miss No Logo, where do you shop?"

Those are the aggressive people. The nice ones ask, "Where should I shop?" Sometimes, they send e-mails requesting annotated lists of "good corporations." Last week, an Irish radio interviewer asked me, on air, for suggestions of ethical gifts his listeners could give their children.

I don't know how I became a professional ethical shopper, and I'm not very good at it. But I can sympathize with the dilemma.

The newspapers are scattered with stories about factory fires in Bangladesh and sweatshop-stained children's toys imported from China. Last week, a coalition of labour and human-rights groups announced that, despite encouragement from the Department of Foreign Affairs to restrict trade with the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar, Canadian retailers have actually increased their imports from that country -- by 170 per cent since last year.

Where do we go from here? There's a big space in the political landscape for a new party, one that looks at the calls for localization and doesn't see a dire threat to national unity.

There is a very simple reason to have a left-wing alternative to the Liberal Party: People are suffering. Despite all the wealth created by deregulated markets, many Canadians are seeing no part of it.

In fishing communities from coast to coast, on family farms, on the streets of large cities, Liberal Canada's recipe for economic growth has meant people being thrown into the global market without a net.

When Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove called for an emergency task force on the future of the NDP, he got blasted. Mr. Hargrove was "posturing," an NDP insider said. "The press isn't the place to do this," Nancy Riche of the Canadian Labour Congress said— in the press. And NDP Leader Alexa McDonough claimed the process Mr. Hargrove demanded was happening already.

It is time to "let a thousand flowers bloom," Ms. McDonough said with a cheerfulness that has become increasingly manic, recalling a post-Regis Kathie Lee Gifford. Elsewhere, Ms. McDonough insisted that "there are no questions that are not fair game to put on the table."

The real question is: Why on earth would anyone on the left entrust this process to the NDP?